Field and Field Set Design Guidelines

Field and Field Set Design Guidelines provide standards for naming fields, specifying field help text and descriptions, configuring field history tracking, and naming field sets.

Naming Fields

For custom fields, we recommend entering a Field Label in title case and Field Name in Pascal case. Field names should be as short as possible without sacrificing clarity.

Examples:

• Consented for Accounts is a checkbox field. A Field Label of Has Consented also clearly represents the meaning, but Consented is used instead because it is shorter with the same level of clarity.
• Last Consented Date for Accounts is as short as possible without sacrificing clarity. If the field was simply called Consented Date it would be unclear if this was the date that the Account first consented or the date they most recently consented.

There is also help text available if staff quickly need more information about a field's usage and purpose. If a field displays in Community Hub and requires help text, consider adding text to the Description Label of the card that the field appears on.

Field Help Text and Description

Help text is the primary source of immediate, additional context for staff who have access to the field. Use it to provide more information about how to read or edit the field. We always recommend providing help text. 

The field description is visible to administrators. Use it to optionally provide more detailed information beyond what the help text provides. If additional information is not necessary, leave it blank.

When writing the text for descriptions and help text, be as efficient as possible without sacrificing clarity. Some tips:

• Wherever possible, avoid text that only reuses the words in the field label. It can be helpful to use synonyms. For example, for a field labeled Incorporation Date, help text such as The date the business account was constituted as a legal corporation. is more helpful than The date of incorporation..
• Use proper sentence capitalization and punctuation.
• Use present tense wherever possible. For example, This will increase the system response time. can be written as This increases the system response time..
• You can use line breaks in help text but you should include punctuation adjacent to each line break because Lightning Experience collapses the text into a single paragraph, converting line breaks into spaces.

Learn more from Salesforce about writing effective user interface text (external).

Field History Tracking

For custom objects and many standard objects, you can select certain fields to track changes made to them.

Since, according to Salesforce Help, history data does not count against your organization’s storage limit, we recommend enabling field history tracking for objects and fields if there is any possibility you may need the history data later, such as for audit purposes.

Multi-select picklist and large text field values are tracked as edited only; the old and new field values are not tracked. Exclude fields with these data types if you have maximized the allowable number of fields to track and if it is not worth tracking that these fields were edited.

Naming Field Sets

We recommend naming field sets with a Field Set Label in title case and Field Set Name in Pascal case with the format:

Field set names should be as short as possible without sacrificing clarity. Specifically:

• For [Community Hub], if you have multiple Community Hubs and the field set is only used in one of them, specify the name of the Community Hub. Omit [Community Hub] and the hyphen if you only have one Community Hub or the field set is used in more than one Community Hub.

• For [context], optionally specify where in Community Hub the field set is used. If it is only used on one page, use the name of the page. If it is used on multiple pages in a single area of Community Hub, use the name of that area or of that area's parent page. Omit [context] and the hyphen if the field set is used across multiple areas of Community Hub.

• For [summary of fields], specify what the fields—as a whole—represent about the object.

For example, for a field set containing mailing address fields for Accounts:

• If it is used exclusively on a My Addresses page in a Community Hub named My ISEN, it can labeled My ISEN - My Addresses - Mailing Address.
• If it is used exclusively on a My Addresses page, it can be labeled My Addresses - Mailing Address.
• If it is used throughout Community Hub, it can simply be labeled Mailing Address.

For Where is this used?, enter a value in title case with the format:

If a [Community Hub] or [context] was not specified for the field set, enter Community Hub.